What Is Relationship Counselling?

If I ask you to imagine what a relationship counselling session looks like, what do you see? I’m pretty confident it’s a room with a couch (sofa, settee, whatever you call it) and two people plonked on it, possibly a bit of a gap between them, facing opposite a clipboard wielding counsellor. And you’d be right. Partly.

There is indeed a counsellor. The rest is up for debate.

There’s a reason I said relationship counselling and not couples counselling, though the two are often conflated. You don’t specifically need two people present to talk about a relationship. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Relationship counselling is a specialised form of counselling, where the focus is on the relationship between people and the unique dynamics at play. The relationship is a system, and that view creates a simple but fundamental difference between relationship counselling and individual counselling.

Right off the bat, a relationship counsellor will consider a relationship as a living, breathing entity. Effectively, a client. So if there are two people in the room, a monogamous couple, the relationship counsellor is actually “seeing” three clients - those two individuals and their relationship with each other. If there is a triad in the room, one type of non-monogamous structure, there are three physical people but multiple relationships.

1. Person A + Person B

2. Person A + Person C

3. Person B + Person C

4. Person A + Person B + Person C

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

That’s why relationship work can happen with even just one person in the room, by the way!

Even if a person in a relationship comes to counselling on their own, the relationship counsellor still “sees” that relationship as a client and will actively bring it into the discussion. This is a marked difference from how an individual counsellor might approach things. And this is not to disparage those professionals! I’m not trained specifically to work with grief for instance, so someone who is a grief counsellor will view and engage the topic with specialised expertise in a way I couldn’t replicate. It’s the same thing here. 

Individual counselling focuses on one person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and typically it draws from theoretical approaches (when you see words like CBT or psychodynamic, methods of practicing counselling basically) that explore a person’s inner world. Applying this to relationship work can be challenging, especially with more than one person in the room. Simply put, if I’m taking all session understanding one person’s childhood experience in isolation, what is the other person, or other people, in the room doing? How does it connect to them? What impact does it have on them? And so on.

Relationship counselling, then, focuses on that space between people. The communication, patterns of interaction and relational dynamics. This calls for an example. 

Every time a couple argues Partner A withdraws - either emotionally or physically, like leaving the room. Partner B pursues, following them out of the room or ramping up the intensity of their argument to get a response. And as a result, Partner A ‘withdraws’ further. This is called a pursuer-distancer dynamic. One party runs away and the other chases after them, leaving both incensed, frustrated, overwhelmed, abandoned…you name it. A relationship counsellor is trained to identify circular patterns like this, and that perspective lets them engage both parties at once to see the underlying dynamic fuelling their conflict.

And let’s suppose, using the same example, that there is only one person in the room. An individual counsellor might solely focus on the anxiety or avoidance of the client in front of them, depending on which part of the puzzle they are playing. Nothing wrong with that and plenty of helpful work has been done that way. To a relationship counsellor though, remember, the relationship is also a client, and that means they can ask questions like: “when you feel emotionally overwhelmed and want to pull away, how does that influence the way your partner responds to you?” or, “what impact do you think it has on your partner when they ask for space and you say that we need to finish this conversation? How does this affect your relationship?” 

This is called circular questioning (a key component of systemic theory, another theoretical approach & a core part of training in relationship work) - not in the sense of going round and round and getting nowhere, but questions that engage an individual to step back slightly and look beyond themselves into the space that connects them to others. When I do this, they respond like that, which affects the relationship like so, and makes me want to do more of this.

See?

I’m nerding out too much now about this stuff, aren’t I? No? Okay then!

The relationship, or relationships in non-monogamous, are like a lighthouse to the relationship counsellor. They are thinking about how everything at play in front of them links back to the relationship(s), and vice versa. People typically come into sessions with a specific incident in mind; the relationship counsellor’s focus is on identifying the patterns which lead to that incident occurring. Because their focus is on this, it gives the relationship counsellor a strong anchor to help from being drawn into the minutiae of details a client can be caught up in. 

A good example of this is what can happen in a couples session, for instance, when there is a disagreement which starts a familiar back & forth between the partners. For counsellors not trained in working with relationships, it can feel like something has gone terribly wrong. Your clients shouldn’t be arguing - that’s bad! Meanwhile, a relationship counsellor will sit there intently, listening and looking for the appropriate moment to step in. They are trained to anticipate that sometimes things will get heated and how to safely contain the session and clients when it does. All while identifying useful insight about the relationship.

“Is this how you argue at home? What usually happens that leads to you communicating like this? What happens after the argument? How do you reconnect with each other? You don’t? What impact has that been having on the relationship? If it continues like this and nothing changes, what do you think will happen to the relationship? What impact might that have on you individually?”

A relationship counsellor isn’t uncomfortable with letting some disagreement play out in the session. It provides useful insight for them. Sometimes, it may be the first time people in the relationship have been able to express something bothering them. The counsellor is acutely aware of potential power imbalances, how they might covertly or overtly show up and the necessity of addressing them appropriately. Their job is to build relational safety, where all parties feel able to express themselves honestly, that one person won’t be permitted to dominate others and conflict is not left to escalate unchecked. Full blown, explosive yelling and finger jabbing isn’t useful to anyone.

Alright then. Hope I haven’t left your head spinning!

What I hope I’ve shown is how, practically speaking, relationship counselling is different to other forms of counselling and why that difference matters. It is so much more than just two people sitting in front of a counsellor. I could go on but for now, to round things off, here’s a question: how many times has the word ‘relationship’ been used in this blog? 😅